Bradbury Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Saul cried. “But I know those men too well.”

  “Are you any different? Hardly! Go out and see if they’re coming. I thought I heard a noise.”

  Saul ran. In the cave entrance he cupped his hands, peering down into the night-filled gully. Dim shapes stirred. Was it only the wind blowing the roving clumps of weeds? He began to tremble a fine, aching tremble.

  “I don’t see anything.” He came back into an empty cave.

  He stared at the fireplace. “Mark!”

  Mark was gone.

  There was nothing but the cave, filled with boulders, stones, pebbles, the lonely fire flickering, the wind sighing. And Saul standing there, incredulous and numb.

  “Mark! Mark! Come back!”

  The man had worked free of his bonds, slowly, carefully, and using the ruse of imagining he heard other men approaching, had gone—where?

  The cave was deep, but ended in a blank wall. And Mark could not have slipped past him into the night. How then?

  Saul stepped around the fire. He drew his knife and approached a large boulder that stood against the cave wall. Smiling, he pressed the knife against the boulder. Smiling, he tapped the knife there. Then he drew his knife back to plunge it into the boulder.

  “Stop!” shouted Mark.

  The boulder vanished. Mark was there.

  Saul suspended his knife. The fire played on his cheeks. His eyes were quite insane.

  “It didn’t work,” he whispered. He reached down and put his hands on Mark’s throat and closed his fingers. Mark said nothing, but moved uneasily in the grip, his eyes ironic, telling things to Saul that Saul knew.

  If you kill me, the eyes said, where will all your dreams be? If you kill me, where will all the streams and brook trout be? Kill me, kill Plato, kill Aristotle, kill Einstein; yes, kill all of us! Go ahead, strangle me. I dare you.

  Saul’s fingers released the throat.

  Shadows moved into the cave mouth.

  Both men turned their heads.

  The other men were there. Five of them, haggard with travel, panting, waiting in the outer rim of light.

  “Good evening,” called Mark, laughing. “Come in, come in, gentlemen!”

  By dawn the arguments and ferocities still continued. Mark sat among the glaring men, rubbing his wrists, newly released from his bonds. He created a mahogany-paneled conference hall and a marble table at which they all sat, ridiculously bearded, evil-smelling, sweating and greedy men, eyes bent upon their treasure.

  “The way to settle it,” said Mark at last, “is for each of you to have certain hours of certain days for appointments with me. I’ll treat you all equally. I’ll be city property, free to come and go. That’s fair enough. As for Saul here, he’s on probation. When he’s proved he can be a civil person once more, I’ll give him a treatment or two. Until that time, I’ll have nothing more to do with him.”

  The other exiles grinned at Saul.

  “I’m sorry,” Saul said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m all right now.”

  “We’ll see,” said Mark. “Let’s give ourselves a month, shall we?”

  The other men grinned at Saul.

  Saul said nothing. He sat staring at the floor of the cave.

  “Let’s see now,” said Mark. “On Mondays it’s your day, Smith.”

  Smith nodded.

  “On Tuesdays I’ll take Peter there, for an hour or so.”

  Peter nodded.

  “On Wednesdays I’ll finish up with Johnson, Holtzman, and Jim, here.”

  The last three men looked at each other.

  “The rest of the week I’m to be left strictly alone, do you hear?” Mark told them. “A little should be better than nothing. If you don’t obey, I won’t perform at all.”

  “Maybe we’ll make you perform,” said Johnson. He caught the other men’s eye. “Look, we’re five against his one. We can make him do anything we want. If we cooperate, we’ve got a great thing here.”

  “Don’t be idiots,” Mark warned the other men.

  “Let me talk,” said Johnson. “He’s telling us what he’ll do. Why don’t we tell him! Are we bigger than him, or not? And him threatening not to perform! Well, just let me get a sliver of wood under his toenails and maybe burn his fingers a bit with a steel file, and we’ll see if he performs! Why shouldn’t we have performances, I want to know, every night in the week?”

  “Don’t listen to him!” said Mark. “He’s crazy. He can’t be depended on. You know what he’ll do, don’t you? He’ll get you all off guard, one by one, and kill you; yes, kill all of you, so that when he’s done, he’ll be alone—just him and me! That’s his sort.”

  The listening men blinked. First at Mark, then at Johnson.

  “For that matter,” observed Mark, “none of you can trust the others. This is a fool’s conference. The minute your back is turned one of the other men will murder you. I dare say, at the week’s end, you’ll all be dead or dying.”

  A cold wind blew into the mahogany room. It began to dissolve and became a cave once more. Mark was tired of his joke. The marble table splashed and rained and evaporated.

  The men gazed suspiciously at each other with little bright animal eyes. What was spoken was true. They saw each other in the days to come, surprising one another, killing—until that last lucky one remained to enjoy the intellectual treasure that walked among them.

  Saul watched them and felt alone and disquieted. Once you have made a mistake, how hard to admit your wrongness, to go back, start fresh. They were all wrong. They had been lost a long time. Now they were worse than lost.

  “And to make matters very bad,” said Mark at last, “one of you has a gun. All the rest of you have only knives. But one of you, I know, has a gun.”

  Everybody jumped up. “Search!” said Mark. “Find the one with the gun or you’re all dead!”

  That did it. The men plunged wildly about, not knowing whom to search first. Their hands grappled, they cried out, and Mark watched them in contempt.

  Johnson fell back, feeling in his jacket. “All right,” he said. “We might as well have it over now! Here, you, Smith.”

  And he shot Smith through the chest. Smith fell. The other men yelled. They broke apart. Johnson aimed and fired twice more.

  “Stop!” cried Mark.

  New York soared up around them, out of rock and cave and sky. Sun glinted on high towers. The elevated thundered; tugs blew in the harbor. The green lady stared across the bay, a torch in her hand.

  “Look, you fools!” said Mark. Central Park broke out constellations of spring blossoms. The wind blew fresh-cut lawn smells over them in a wave.

  And in the center of New York, bewildered, the men stumbled. Johnson fired his gun three times more. Saul ran forward. He crashed against Johnson, bore him down, wrenched the gun away. It fired again.

  The men stopped milling.

  They stood. Saul lay across Johnson. They ceased struggling.

  There was a terrible silence. The men stood watching. New York sank down into the sea. With a hissing, bubbling, sighing; with a cry of ruined metal and old time, the great structures leaned, warped, flowed, collapsed.

  Mark stood among the buildings. Then, like a building, a neat red hole drilled into his chest, wordless, he fell.

  Saul lay staring at the men, at the body.

  He got up, the gun in his hand.

  Johnson did not move—was afraid to move.

  They all shut their eyes and opened them again, thinking that by so doing they might reanimate the man who lay before them.

  The cave was cold.

  Saul stood up and looked, remotely, at the gun in his hand. He took it and threw it far out over the valley and did not watch it fall.

  They looked down at the body as if they could not believe it. Saul bent down and took hold of the limp hand. “Leonard!” he said softly. “Leonard?” He shook the hand. “Leonard!”

  Leonard Mark did not mov
e. His eyes were shut; his chest had ceased going up and down. He was getting cold.

  Saul got up. “We’ve killed him,” he said, not looking at the men. His mouth was filling with a raw liquor now. “The only one we didn’t want to kill, we killed.” He put his shaking hand to his eyes. The other men stood waiting.

  “Get a spade,” said Saul. “Bury him.” He turned away. “I’ll have nothing to do with you.”

  Somebody walked off to find a spade.

  Saul was so weak he couldn’t move. His legs were grown into the earth, with roots feeding deep of loneliness and fear and the cold of the night. The fire had almost died out and now there was only the double moonlight riding over the blue mountains.

  There was the sound of someone digging in the earth with a spade.

  “We don’t need him anyhow,” said somebody, much too loudly.

  The sound of digging went on. Saul walked off slowly and let himself slide down the side of a dark tree until he reached and was sitting blankly on the sand, his hands blindly in his lap.

  Sleep, he thought. We’ll all go to sleep now. We have that much, anyway. Go to sleep and try to dream of New York and all the rest.

  He closed his eyes wearily, the blood gathering in his nose and his mouth and in his quivering eyes.

  “How did he do it?” he asked in a tired voice. His head fell forward on his chest. “How did he bring New York up here and make us walk around in it? Let’s try. It shouldn’t be too hard. Think! Think of New York,” he whispered, falling down into sleep. “New York and Central Park and then Illinois in the spring, apple blossoms and green grass.”

  It didn’t work. It wasn’t the same. New York was gone and nothing he could do would bring it back. He would rise every morning and walk on the dead sea looking for it, and walk forever around Mars, looking for it, and never find it. And finally lie, too tired to walk, trying to find New York in his head, but not finding it.

  The last thing he heard before he slept was the spade rising and falling and digging a hole into which, with a tremendous crash of metal and golden mist and odor and color and sound, New York collapsed, fell, and was buried.

  He cried all night in his sleep.

  THE MAN

  CAPTAIN HART STOOD IN THE DOOR of the rocket. “Why don’t they come?” he said.

  “Who knows?” said Martin, his lieutenant. “Do I know, Captain?”

  “What kind of a place is this, anyway?” The captain lighted a cigar. He tossed the match out into the glittering meadow. The grass started to burn.

  Martin moved to stamp it out with his boot.

  “No,” ordered Captain Hart, “let it burn. Maybe they’ll come see what’s happening then, the ignorant fools.”

  Martin shrugged and withdrew his foot from the spreading fire.

  Captain Hart examined his watch. “An hour ago we landed here, and does the welcoming committee rush out with a brass band to shake our hands? No indeed! Here we ride millions of miles through space and the fine citizens of some silly town on some unknown planet ignore us!” He snorted, tapping his watch. “Well, I’ll just give them five more minutes, and then—”

  “And then what?” asked Martin, ever so politely, watching the captain’s jowls shake.

  “We’ll fly over their damned city again and scare hell out of them.” His voice grew quieter. “Do you think, Martin, maybe they didn’t see us land?”

  “They saw us. They looked up as we flew over.”

  “Then why aren’t they running across the field? Are they hiding? Are they yellow?”

  Martin shook his head. “No. Take these binoculars, sir. See for yourself. Everybody’s walking around. They’re not frightened. They—well, they just don’t seem to care.”

  Captain Hart placed the binoculars to his tired eyes. Martin looked up and had time to observe the lines and the grooves of irritation, tiredness, nervousness there. Hart looked a million years old; he never slept, he ate little, and drove himself on, on. Now his mouth moved, aged and drear, but sharp, under the held binoculars.

  “Really, Martin, I don’t know why we bother. We build rockets, we go to all the trouble of crossing space, searching for them, and this is what we get. Neglect. Look at those idiots wander about in there. Don’t they realize how big this is? The first space flight to touch their provincial land. How many times does that happen? Are they that blasé?”

  Martin didn’t know.

  Captain Hart gave him back the binoculars wearily. “Why do we do it, Martin? This space travel, I mean. Always on the go. Always searching. Our insides always tight, never any rest.”

  “Maybe we’re looking for peace and quiet. Certainly there’s none on Earth,” said Martin.

  “No, there’s not, is there?” Captain Hart was thoughtful, the fire damped down. “Not since Darwin, eh? Not since everything went by the board, everything we used to believe in, eh? Divine power and all that. And so you think maybe that’s why we’re going out to the stars, eh, Martin? Looking for our lost souls, is that it? Trying to get away from our evil planet to a good one?”

  “Perhaps, sir. Certainly we’re looking for something.”

  Captain Hart cleared his throat and tightened back into sharpness. “Well, right now we’re looking for the mayor of that city there. Run in, tell them who we are, the first rocket expedition to Planet Forty-three in Star System Three. Captain Hart sends his salutations and desires to meet the mayor. On the double!”

  “Yes, sir.” Martin walked slowly across the meadow.

  “Hurry!” snapped the captain.

  “Yes, sir!” Martin trotted away. Then he walked again, smiling to himself.

  The captain had smoked two cigars before Martin returned.

  Martin stopped and looked up into the door of the rocket, swaying, seemingly unable to focus his eyes or think.

  “Well?” snapped Hart. “What happened? Are they coming to welcome us?”

  “No.” Martin had to lean dizzily against the ship.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not important,” said Martin. “Give me a cigarette, please, Captain.” His fingers groped blindly at the rising pack, for he was looking at the golden city and blinking. He lighted one and smoked quietly for a long time.

  “Say something!” cried the captain. “Aren’t they interested in our rocket?”

  Martin said, “What? Oh. The rocket?” He inspected his cigarette. “No, they’re not interested. Seems we came at an inopportune time.”

  “Inopportune time!”

  Martin was patient. “Captain, listen. Something big happened yesterday in that city. It’s so big, so important that we’re second-rate—second fiddle. I’ve got to sit down.” He lost his balance and sat heavily, gasping for air.

  The captain chewed his cigar angrily. “What happened?”

  Martin lifted his head, smoke from the burning cigarette in his fingers, blowing in the wind. “Sir, yesterday, in that city, a remarkable man appeared—good, intelligent, compassionate, and infinitely wise!”

  The captain glared at his lieutenant. “What’s that to do with us?”

  “It’s hard to explain. But he was a man for whom they’d waited a long time—a million years maybe. And yesterday he walked into their city. That’s why today, sir, our rocket landing means nothing.”

  The captain sat down violently. “Who was it? Not Ashley? He didn’t arrive in his rocket before us and steal my glory, did he?” He seized Martin’s arm. His face was pale and dismayed.

  “Not Ashley, sir.”

  “Then it was Burton! I knew it. Burton stole in ahead of us and ruined my landing! You can’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “Not Burton, either, sir,” said Martin quietly.

  The captain was incredulous. “There were only three rockets. We were in the lead. This man who got here ahead of us? What was his name!”

  “He didn’t have a name. He doesn’t need one. It would be different on every planet, sir.”

  The captain stared at
his lieutenant with hard, cynical eyes.

  “Well, what did he do that was so wonderful that nobody even looks at our ship?”

  “For one thing,” said Martin steadily, “he healed the sick and comforted the poor. He fought hypocrisy and dirty politics and sat among the people, talking, through the day.”

  “Is that so wonderful?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “I don’t get this.” The captain confronted Martin, peered into his face and eyes. “You been drinking, eh?” He was suspicious. He backed away. “I don’t understand.”

  Martin looked at the city. “Captain, if you don’t understand, there’s no way of telling you.”

  The captain followed his gaze. The city was quiet and beautiful and a great peace lay over it. The captain stepped forward, taking his cigar from his lips. He squinted first at Martin, then at the golden spires of the buildings.

  “You don’t mean—you can’t mean—That man you’re talking about couldn’t be—”

  Martin nodded. “That’s what I mean, sir.”

  The captain stood silently, not moving. He drew himself up.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said at last.

  At high noon Captain Hart walked briskly into the city, accompanied by Lieutenant Martin and an assistant who was carrying some electrical equipment. Every once in a while the captain laughed loudly, put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

  The mayor of the town confronted him. Martin set up a tripod, screwed a box onto it, and switched on the batteries.

  “Are you the mayor?” The captain jabbed a finger out.

  “I am,” said the mayor.

  The delicate apparatus stood between them, controlled and adjusted by Martin and the assistant. Instantaneous translations from any language were made by the box. The words sounded crisply on the mild air of the city.

  “About this occurrence yesterday,” said the captain. “It occurred?”

  “It did.”

  “You have witnesses?”

  “We have.”

  “May we talk to them?”

  “Talk to any of us,” said the mayor. “We are all witnesses.”

  In an aside to Martin the captain said, “Mass hallucination.” To the mayor, “What did this man—this stranger—look like?”